A known vehicle body structure includes energy containers individually provided on a side of a driver's seat and a side of a passenger's seat below a floor panel. As for this vehicle body structure, it is necessary to provide a communicating pipe through which the driver's seat side fuel container communicates with the passenger's seat side fuel container as well as to provide individual pumps for delivering fuel from the respective fuel containers.
In order to eliminate the communicating and reduce the number of the fuel-delivering pumps, an integral fuel container extending from the driver's side to the passenger's side has been proposed (see e.g., Patent Literature 1 below). Since the integral fuel container is a single-piece container, the number of the components is reduced and thus a space between the driver's seat side and the passenger's seat side below the floor panel is available for part of the fuel container. Since the part of the fuel container uses the space between the driver's seat side and the passenger's seat side, the fuel container can have a large capacity.
The vehicle body structure disclosed in Patent Literature 1 includes floor frames (reinforcement members) provided on left and right sides of the fuel container beneath the floor panel. The left and right floor frames extend in a front-rear direction of the vehicle body along left and right surfaces of the fuel container. The floor frames, which are provided on the left and right sides of the fuel container, can absorb an impact load due to a lateral collision and thus protect the fuel container.
As for the vehicle body structure disclosed in Patent Literature 1, an exhaust pipe is provided between the right floor frame and the fuel container. Because of the exhaust pipe, it is difficult to place a fuel container widening in a left-right direction (i.e., in a widthwise direction of the vehicle). That is, the exhaust pipe is an obstruction to increasing the capacity of the fuel container. It is thought that the floor frame is removed from the vehicle body structure in order to place the fuel container widening in the widthwise direction of the vehicle. However, even with the floor panel removed, an amount of crushing is limited because the exhaust pipe has a relatively high rigidity due to a plurality of pipes or partition walls being disposed in the exhaust pipe. It is thus difficult to well absorb the impact load, and necessary to secure a large amount of crushing on the side of the fuel container near the exhaust pipe, taking account of the exhaust pipe limiting the amount of crushing. It is thus thought that placing the fuel container (i.e., the energy container) widening toward the exhaust pipe to increase the capacity is difficult even with the floor frame removed from the vehicle body structure.